Politics in the News

Whether you are a libertarian, conservative, NRA member or simply a citizen concerned
with today's political climate, you will find news items of interest and relevance on
Reliable Answers "Politics in the News."

What message are our legislators sending to voters, when they publicly admit they
haven't done their job? How many bills are passed each year that policymakers haven't
even bothered to read? This is disgraceful. This is called dereliction of duties and
we must demand a stop to this practice.

If you travel to the Caribbean, Mexico or even Canada, the federal government soon will require that you have a valid passport to get back home. For the first time, Canadian's will need a passport to travel south.

Aimed at further reinforcing the U.S. perimeter against terrorist threats, the new rules for air, land and sea travel, announced yesterday by the departments of State and Homeland Security, will be phased in over two years between December 2005 and December 2007. The impact of these changes could be especially strong in the Pacific Northwest, just south of Canada's British Columbia, site of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Why corporate reformers are ignoring the real revolution in education.

Would-be reformers continue to give generously to a public school system they routinely condemn as inefficient, dysfunctional, and hopelessly obsolete. A survey of Fortune 500 companies found that teaching employees "basic skills" accounted for 17 percent of their training costs in 2002.

College students and police investigators watched or listened to ten prison inmates confessing to crimes. Half the confessions were true accounts; half were false-concocted for the study.

Consistent with much recent research, students were generally more accurate than police, and accuracy rates were higher among those presented with audiotaped than videotaped confessions. In addition, investigators were significantly more confident in their judgments and also prone to judge confessors guilty. To determine if police accuracy would increase if this guilty response bias were neutralized, participants in a second experiment were specifically informed that half the confessions were true and half were false. This manipulation eliminated the investigator response bias, but it did not increase accuracy or lower confidence. These findings are discussed for what they imply about the post-interrogation risks to innocent suspects who confess.

The antics that Arnold Schwarzenegger employs each day would turn any other politician into a joke. The Governator of California drives around in an olive-green, doorless Hummer with the license plate "Reform 1."

He holds court in a majestic white tent outside the governor's office, like an Arab sheik, so that he can smoke the cigars that are forbidden inside state buildings. He encourages visitors to touch the sword he brandished in Conan the Barbarian . His conversation overflows with winking references to the "part" he is now playing, or the "theatrics" of a political battle, and he often relies on his trademark "I'll be baaaaahck!"

As the Federal Election Commission takes its first steps to shape campaign rules for the blog era, FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith warned that proposed rules present unanswered questions for bloggers:

The draft rules provide some protections for "individual" political commentators. But what if a group of people jointly publish a blog' "If one of the bloggers received payment for an activity, would it turn the group into a political committee" subject to campaign finance regulation, Smith asked. He pointed to the academic-leaning Volokh Conspiracy blog, which has multiple contributors.

WASHINGTON - The nation’s undocumented immigrant population surged to 10.3 million last year, spurred largely since 2000 by the arrivals of unauthorized Mexicans in the United States, according to a report released Monday.

The population of undocumented residents in the United States increased by about 23 percent from 8.4 million in the four-year period ending last March, according to the analysis of government data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a private research group.
That equates to a net increase of roughly 485,000 per year between 2000 and 2004. The estimate was derived by subtracting the number of unauthorized immigrants who leave the United States, die or acquire legal status from the number of new undocumented immigrants that arrive each year.

Capitalism died in 1929 according to the esteemed pundits of our day. Since that fateful year, intellectuals and politicians of our country have been promoting the welfare state as a "safe, responsible, middle ground."

Today's chaotic and corrupted America does little, though, to reinforce this notion. What the last seventy years have shown with their epileptic breakdown in socio-economic order, is that the welfare state is not a stable middle ground at all, but a highly unstable mixture of individual freedom and government intervention that is evolving steadily away from freedom toward an all pervasive statism.

In September of 2000, less than two years before the passage of McCain-Feingold, the liberal magazine The American Prospect put out a special issue devoted to campaign-finance reform.

It was called, "Checkbook Democracy." And it was bought and paid for with a $132,000 check from the liberal Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has spent millions of dollars promoting laws to restrict political speech -- a fact the magazine never disclosed to its readers.

A state audit of pet projects funded at the behest of various lawmakers found widespread misuse of the money, with investigators concluding that more than $1.1 million never went where it was supposed to go.

The report, which was released Wednesday by state Controller Steve Westly, cites museum projects that were paid for by taxpayers but never built, project directors who funneled state money into their personal accounts and a city that left the state on the hook for $700,000 after abandoning a sports complex project.

Supremacists a border worry FBI, civilian group are concerned about racists joining border sweeps next month.

The Internet-driven recruiting effort for the Minuteman Project has almost 900 volunteers and last week alone generated more than 1 million hits on the project's Web site, organizers said. But the patrol also has drawn major interest on white supremacist Web sites and in their chat rooms. An Aryan Nation site links directly to the Minuteman Project home page with the words: "A call for action on part of ALL ARYAN SOLDIERS."